Comments Posted By TMLutas
Displaying 31 To 38 Of 38 Comments
INTELLECTUAL CONSERVATISM ISN'T DEAD: MAINTAINING A CONSISTENT PHILOSOPHY
The Contract with America was released in late spring/early summer of 1994. Prior to its release, nobody knew about it. It was a well poll tested set of ideas that all had 80% support rates but which would not pass a Democrat majority House.
I submit to you that there is nothing intellectual about finding such ideas. But do not despair, conservative intellectual leadership could produce something even better than the Contract with America.
The Contract was born of 40+ years of frustration and good ideas bottled up because they were uncomfortable for Democrat partisans. 4 years of a Democrat majority in the House will not create a similar feeling so it won't work as well this time.
What would be better is a number of ideas that would be popular with a supermajority of voters, be easy enough to explain via the popularizers, and would be rejected by the Nancy Pelosi's of the world.
Here's one:
Rate all line expenditures top to bottom in the federal budget and pledge to kill off the bottom 10%. This is intelligent budget cutting and the big government folks are allergic to it.Do the rating exercise every year, pledging to end the government roller coaster that can't see past the boom to the next recession. Pledge to create something along the line of BRAC so that changes actually happen and the worst of government, in all departments, eventually gets swept out no matter how good a program's K street lobbyists are.
Create tools so that every Senator, every House member can do it every year and make the non-classified data available to the people so that they can play along if they wish. The 1 in 1000 who do would provide real oversight that would be baked in even when the Democrats regained their majorities.
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 13.10.2009 @ 08:09
INTELLECTUAL CONSERVATISM ISN'T DEAD: CHANNEL YOUR INNER ELDER
Figure out how to deliver data in a useful way that does not financially depend on emotionalism to generate money and this problem largely solves itself. I think that a data driven presentation of the world is going to really help the small government movement, and that these same talkers that are so annoying to many with their over the top heat are going to branch out into exactly this sort of format because it's extra money and for certain types of discussions better than talk radio or talking heads on TV.
So how much time would you devote to fixing the problem? I'm working on this.
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 8.10.2009 @ 08:14
INTELLECTUAL CONSERVATISM ISN'T DEAD: IT'S RESTING
You do not build by subtraction. If you want a more intellectual conservatism you add voices, add intellectual rigor, add intellectual tools, add schools, build an intellectual framework, etc. The popularizers will shrink in influence because they will be the same crew as otherwise in a much larger conservative pie.
The truth is that intellectuals are being picked off by the left in the schools and universities, their ranks being decimated by kangaroo courts at doctoral dissertations and at other points of the intellectual creation pipeline. There is your real enemy, the real problem facing intellectual conservatism.
The left is cutting the intellectuals off at the knees. That's a problem. Do you have a solution? Or do you just want to play procrustes and chop down the popularizers so nobody will notice how shrunken the intellectuals have become?
As it happens, I do have a solution. Just like everything else, the business model of the modern university is vulnerable right now. Creating alternative educational avenues that will explode the corrupt departments with their conservative blacklists, starving them of students, tuition dollars, and influence is probably the greatest undertaking that those who want to enhance the conservative intellectual faction.
Look at the open courseware movement and create a supplementary K-12 and university curriculum that conservative parents can insist their children go through so that their biased professors and teachers don't create one-dimensional liberal drones out of the next generation. Do it well so that there's a positive correlation in educational testing results and 1st year salaries and you'll get the centrists to come on board.
There's a lot that can be done. I'm looking to do my own part. If we'd waste less time on trying to shrink other factions down to size, I might have some allies to help along.
Well said. And I think you mistake my desire to "marginalize" populizers with purging them. The problem on the right is that it isn't there aren't enough intellectuals - it's that they are ignored. Your idea to "grow" conservative academia sounds like you want to replace liberal orthodoxy for lock step conservatism. I want universities to get back to a place where the free exchange of ideas - right and left - is protected and encouraged. That's the kind of university experience I had back in the early 1970's. It can be regained not by overlaying another strata of educational infrastructure that would be just as rigid on the right as any leftist academic enclave, but by doing what they're doing at Dartmouth; electing conservative trustees and pressuring boards to live up to the credo of intellectual freedom they purport to subscribe.
ed.
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 6.10.2009 @ 09:26
VIRTUAL DEBATE OVER IRAN'S NUCLEAR PROGRAM
Wow, what a thread hijack.
Back on topic...
Assuming the Iranians are crazy leads to a need for intervention but assuming they are sane does not lead to the happy world that the other side of the debate is painting. Instead you have a bifurcated program where periodically undeclared facilities are cleaned up and declared to explain all the anomalous intelligence coming out of Iran and lead to new rounds of distraction and delay while Iran secures its independent future to do whatever the government of the day wishes.
Put yourself in the shoes of an Iranian program manager running a split nuclear program, one part secret enrichment for weapons, one part public enrichment for peaceful nuclear power. How would you divide your centrifuge production between the two? How would you divide the LEU produced by both between the two (assuming diversion is possible)?
Is there any rational, managerial reasoning to put all your early production into the public program which has to stop at LEU and none of it into the unmonitored program where you can continue to refine it into HEU and work out more bomb production problems?
The simple, logical conclusion is that there is an illegal program, complete with centrifuges that has produced an unknown amount of enriched uranium outside the IAEA process. This conclusion is driven by the idea that no sane project manager would build the program any other way. The only other viable alternative consistent with sane Iranian leadership is that there is no bomb program but that runs afoul of both the undeclared facility recently brought out into the open and a lot of anomalous intelligence pointing to something more happening than what is declared.
The experience of the Cernavoda nuclear power station which was given to Romania as a reward for coming clean on its Ceausescu era nuclear weapons program demonstrates that Iran is passing up on huge potential benefits by not opening up its activities fully. So what's worth giving up all that free nuclear technology and power?
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 5.10.2009 @ 08:32
OF LOUTS, BRUTES, AND BOORS IN PUBLIC LIFE
The GOP has at least three healthcare reform bills in the hopper. Somewhere I've got the bill numbers. Like most minority bills, the chances of these things seeing daylight on the floor before the next GOP majority is almost nil. Their existence gives the lie to Democrat claims that the GOP has no plan.
It would be fair to mock the GOP plans, oppose the GOP plans, use those plans in the next election in vulnerable districts, but it is not fair and goes beyond loutishness to say that they don't exist. You don't get to airbrush submitted legislation that has had its first reading and been sent to committee even if it is a foregone conclusion that the Democrat chairman is going to bury the bill and never bring it up for debate and markup.
The problem isn't the neanderthal comment. That's uncivil but certainly in bounds in the rough and tumble world of politics. What's out of bounds is to say that the GOP wants you, yes you, to die and die quickly if you get sick.
There is no reasonable policy hook to attach to this "wants you to die" meme. It is not hyperbole but a flat out lie and it is a dehumanizing lie meant to shame people into not associating with the GOP. It was done from the well of the House. That's not acceptable in normal political discourse but to Nancy Pelosi it is acceptable.
I hope it stops here with Grayson and Schultz (who said it first and on MSNBC). If it spreads, the republic is in serious trouble.
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 3.10.2009 @ 23:59
Asking if Glenn Beck is the enemy is the wrong question. Was the John Birch Society ever the enemy? I don't think so. That doesn't mean that William F Buckley was wrong to read them out of the conservative movement. Even today, the JBS is around, largely impotent but a going concern.
The JBS was read out of the conservatives by attacks from the right, that they were insufficiently conservative. If Glenn Beck is to be read out of the movement, there's one striking advantage here. He doesn't claim to be a conservative. There, job done. What's being done is a lie, a falsehood, committed by the mainstream left to conflate a self-described libertarian with conservatism.
There is an alliance, one of convenience for both sides, between conservatives and libertarians. This is well known inside the GOP and the right. The left takes delight in wedging this alliance and trying to force libertarians to defend conservative positions and conservatives to defend libertarian ones.
Somehow reaching across the party lines is viewed as somewhat noble bipartisanship that's for the good of the country but reaching across the libertarian/conservative divide is viewed less admirably. This is the politics of division.
I don't think that Glenn Beck has everything right. From what I can tell he's got significant policy differences with me. He also doesn't seem to do his research at the very least. And I'm a libertarian. In a world where Obama isn't pilloried to renounce the modern day wobblies (ANSWER) when he finds himself on the same side, why should the right accede to a double standard?
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 23.09.2009 @ 07:28
REFLECTIONS ON GOD, MAN, AND CPAC
To actually answer your question, I'd suggest a "do you know where you come from?" quiz on the web. Give a short series of questions that anybody who had a basic set of knowledge about western philosophy and history should be able to answer. For wrong answers, provide:
1. A list of really cool things this fellow invented or did with links to more detail.
2. A small point regarding how can one be truly diverse if you don't know your own society's foundation.
3. An invitation to participate in a sort of intro to the conservative tradition group.Now go off to some youth oriented sites that have cheap ad spots (look at project wonderful for instance) and buy up some ad space.
If Obama doesn't bankrupt us, this is the sort of thing that I'll be doing once my wife's startup finishes turning the corner. The idea of doing something outside of school to teach is not bad. In the end though it's action that will count.
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 28.02.2009 @ 23:02
EXPLOITING TAXPAYER RAGE NOT THE WAY BACK FOR GOP
How about something positive. Ronald Reagan never did get much traction with the huge problem of paring back the regulatory state but going for this is a positive approach that would unite the nostalgics (Reagan's unfulfilled agenda!) as well as the small government types (it's about directly shrinking government after all) and shouldn't offend sane Democrats (who really supports regulations that do more harm than good?) and thus could be a bipartisan initiative that would embarrass Pelosi and Reid.
The key is that identifying the bad regulations is a huge information processing problem. When Reagan was President the processing power needed to track and attack the worst of the worst was big and expensive. Today we still have a tools problem but it's one of compiling the data in a standard format and parsing it out for analysis so that we can go pick off the high impact ones. This is doable.
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 28.02.2009 @ 23:13
